Christian Sex and Marriage

There is a lot of hoopla about practicing abstinence until marriage. Yepper, I’m going to focus on Christians primarily. So get ready for a less-than-racy account of the context of this Christian dogma.

When the Gospels were being pieced together over the course of fifty or so years, the world was a very different place. There was no modern medicine, no antibiotics, and no developed understanding of surgical procedures. Thus, a lot more people were succumbing to disease and infected wounds from nasty metal objects. Rome and its provinces sported effective urban design but following its fall it would take fourteen centuries to reach that former level of cleanliness in Europe. Excluding infant mortality which tends to skew figures toward lower-than-accurate ranges, the life expectancy in Europe and Eurasia from about AD 1 through the High Middle Ages was quite lower than it is today.

What does all of this have to do with screwing? Well, most of the world pre-1600 devoted itself to subsistence farming or mild surplus cropping in limited markets beginning after the decline of Viking invasions. In order to farm and produce sufficient food, families needed to be large. The extra hands meant extra labor. In order to produce enough food to feed these large families, farming was needed, and large families were needed to effectively farm. The two went hand in hand. Now, what do you get in a world where people are kicking the bucket at unexpected and early times, yet need to keep farming to stay alive?